Allan Massie is a Scottish writer who has published nearly 30 books, including a sequence of novels set in ancient Rome. His non-fiction works range from a study of Byron's travels to a celebration of Scottish rugby. He has been a political columnist for The Scotsman, The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph and writes a literary column for The Spectator.

'The female of the species is more deadly than the male': the poem that should have been read at Thatcher's funeral

In 1943, the year which saw him move from being Commander-in Chief, South-West Pacific to Viceroy of India, Field-Marshal Lord Wavell compiled the anthology which he entitled Other Men’s Flowers. It was composed of all the poems and verse which he knew, or had known, by heart, though he also included a poem of his own, rather a good one, Sonnet for the Madonna of the Cherries, which he described as a “little wayside dandelion” in his “garden of other men’s flowers”.

The anthology was popular, going through several impressions. A revised edition was published in 1948 and this too was reprinted. My own copy – the 1951 reprint – was given to me by my English master when I left prep school the following year, and I’ve returned to it often over the decades since.

It‘s a very good anthology, interesting in itself, but also as a revelation of the Field-Marshal‘s taste. "Browning and Kipling," he wrote in the Preface, “are the two poets whose work has stayed most in my memory, since I read them in impressionable youth. I have never regretted my choice. They have courage and humanity, and their feet are usually on the ground.” He remarked that “Practically all the verse in this collection is capable of being declaimed; it seems to me a function of poetry that it should be so. Poetry in its origins was certainly a declamatory art, usually post-prandial or post-proeliatory”. “The Prime Minister, Mr Winston Churchill”, he added, "has stored in his prodigious memory much poetry which he declaims on apt occasion; I have had the pleasure of hearing some of the verses in this anthology repeated by him”.

The two pieces of poetry – excerpts from TS Eliot’s Little Gidding and Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode – chosen by Margaret Thatcher to appear in her Funeral order of Service make one wonder what an anthology of her favourite poetry might be like. The choice of the Eliot verses, quiet, contemplative, very Anglican, may have surprised many of us. It hints at a side of her character which was seldom revealed in public, though one might add that the Eliot lines accord well with the seriousness of the address she gave to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, an address which was widely, and indeed wilfully, misinterpreted by many, but in truth offered evidence of how well she knew the Bible, and how deeply she had pondered her Christian faith. Nevertheless one wouldn’t have guessed that Eliot was a favourite poet, though, if told this was the case, one would certainly have plumped for the Eliot of The Four Quartets rather than the Eliot of The Waste Land. or The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, the defeatism of which would surely have provoked the Lady’s scorn.

Still one might have suspected that, setting out to choose verses to introduce her funeral service, she might have chosen something more vigorous and defiant: WE Henley’s Invictus for instance with its ringing assertion:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

Or perhaps, Arthur Hugh Clough’s Say not the struggle naught availed, verses incidentally that Churchill himself quoted when the USA entered the war against Hitler. "But, westward, look, the land is bright.”

Her preference for Eliot and Wordsworth speaks of a side of Lady Thatcher which was perhaps more contemplative than many thought to exist; and is therefore interesting.

More mischievously however, in the impossible event of having been asked to draw up the Order of Service for her funeral, I might not have been unable to resist the temptation of prefacing it with these lines from Field-Marshal Wavell’s favourite Kipling:

When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside,
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail,
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.